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Jetboil Summit Skillet review

Oh how we love our Jetboil Summit Skillet. Being able to cook bacon and eggs on any camping trip, especially wild ones is absolute bliss. Here’s our review of this ‘essential’ piece of camping gear.

We’ve commented on this skillet before, in our review of the Jetboil MiniMo cook system. We’ve cooked lots of times on this skillet now, sometimes without oil (as we didn’t have any with us) and it’s still as good as when it was new.

The Jetboil Summit Skillet only weighs 300 grams and it’s lightweight aluminium body heats up quickly. Measuring 8” diameter means it’s small enough to fit easily into your backpack and big enough to cope with 4 rashers of bacon and a couple of steaks (not at the same time) – We should know (check the photos).

Is it a skillet or a frying pan? Who cares, it helps us to cook up some really tasty meals and that’s all that we are interested in. Jetboil do have a Fry Pan, but that’s got a FluxRing incorporated into the bottom so it’s a bit difficult to get then confused.

It comes with it’s own carry bag which is useful for keeping the other gear in your backpack grease free when the skillet has to be packed away unwashed. The bag also prevents the non-stick from getting scratched too and it can just be thrown in the washing machine to get it clean again.
It has a clever foldaway handle that houses a really useful spatula. This is great as you will always have something to hand to turn or stir your food with.
The ridges on the bottom of the pan not only help give better heat distribution because of the larger surface area, but they also make the bottom of the skillet really grippy so it doesn’t slide about when on the stove.

Built to last and easy to clean.
So we’ve had this Jetboil Summit skillet/frying pan for a few months and its been on a fair few trips with us now. It’s been in and out of rucksacks, in and out of the van quite a few times and it does look like it’s going to last a very long time. Looking at the price of this skillet, it would be easy to conclude that it isn’t cheap and that there are more cost-effective alternatives available.

Looking online, the best price we could find at the time of writing was £40. You can definitely get cheaper camping frying pans, but looking at them it’s like comparing a Pirelli to a budget branded tyre. You just know that one is going to give the service you expect and the other is going to fall apart much sooner than it should.

Oh, and cleaning up after use is a dream. We've used it lots of times on lots of different foods and we haven't had anything stick to it. So cleaning it up after that tasty meal it's just helped you to prepare is really easy.

Conclusion.
The Jetboil is going to continue to assist us in preparing more tasty camping meals for a very long time. It’s easy to clean and stuff doesn’t stick to it. For those that want to invest in reliable gear that goes on and on then this appears to be a great choice - and who doesn’t like a delicious bacon and egg butty in the great outdoors :o)

NOTE - Do not use this skillet on any Jetboil stoves without whether you need to use their pan support. Doing so is dangerous and will cause damage to the stove.